1. Field of the Invention
The disclosed embodiments relate to the general field of document processing with data capturing devices. More particularly, the disclosed embodiments relate to a processing system for evaluations containing responses in a pictorial form well suited for use in data collection, and methods of processing thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
Efficiency and effectiveness of data collection are both important to evaluation practitioners. While methods of capturing quantitative data directly in digital electronic forms are available, much data collection still involves paper documents as a familiar media providing necessary affordability, simplicity and unconstrained response format. Paper-based evaluations are routinely used in education for knowledge assessments, in business environments for customer surveys, and in government institutions for personal data acquisition. One challenge associated with these evaluations generally arises from a number of conflicting data collection goals, including the desirability of administering a holistic evaluation containing open-ended responses while maintaining high data collection efficiency.
Over the last several decades, the efficiency aspect of data collection has seen multiple improvements. These gains in efficiency have often sacrificed the effectiveness of acquired data, for example, by reducing the process of answering an evaluation question to selecting among several clearly indicated pre-compiled answer options. However, there has been relatively little success in creating more effective paper-based and other data collection methods requiring little human intervention. A crowded field of paper-based evaluation processing has not been able to produce a viable solution to this long felt need among evaluation practitioners. Presently, unconstrained or open-ended responses typically require discretionary assessment, that is a time-consuming approach prone to human error, and so they are often avoided despite their multiple benefits. As a result, many standardized evaluations are being designed to adhere to the available simplistic response formats, which may have a profound effect on overall evaluation effectiveness. This is especially true in education where assessment influences the form of instruction, where open-ended responses showing the thought process of a student are used for diagnosis of student misconceptions, and where the younger population prefers highly intuitive and engaging question formats.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to provide a system that processes evaluations containing responses in a substantially unconstrained pictorial form, yet still provides the data collection efficiency that evaluation practitioners desire. It would also be beneficial to provide methods for processing a broad variety of such pictorial responses that significantly reduce the amount of human effort presently required for such processing.